The Republican Party, which with blood in its eye has often gone gunning for professors, last week got some clear-eyed professorial advice. The advice came from Ohio Northern University's Dr. Wilfred Ellsworth Binkley, history and political science professor. His new book, American Political Parties: Their Natural History (Knopf, $3.75), told Republicans: if they want to win the 1944 election they must find another Theodore Roosevelt.
Dr. Binkley's was no hasty diagnosis.
His book is a painstaking, sobersided examination of the U.S. two-party system and its leaders. Advancing the thesis that the most successful U.S. political leaders have been masters of the...